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Approaching the IVCI finish line, focusing on my personal impressions of two of the six finalists

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Now the famously non-arm-twisting judging procedure of the International Violin Competition of Indianapolis once again approaches validation, as six finalists merge from 38 registered participants who convened on Sept. 17 here to begin the well-organized sorting out of scores independently arrived out, with  any outlying totals ineffective in swaying the rsult.  At the end of the concerto finals Saturday night, the  three medalists will be announced at Hilbert Circle Theater, with those finishing in fourth, fifth and sixth place honored as laureates. Having missed a large amount of the preliminary and semi-final rounds, it's no surprise that I have first-hand impressions of only two participants to offer, based on those initial phases.  Karisa Chiu My most recent impression is of Karisa Chiu, who comes from a musical family with Indianapolis roots. Her uncle, Frederic Chiu, grew up here and made a notably celebrated appearance at the Van Cliburn competition in 1993,...
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Change of seasons, meteorological and musical: ISO opens 2026-27 with 'The Rite of Spring'

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Original costume designs for "The Rite of Spring"  Lots of risers in the orchestra, lots of youth in the audience.  Clearly something outsize and extra-inviting was on hand Friday night when the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra opened the 2026-27 season at Hilbert Circle Theatre. With the program having been already finely honed in performance the night before at Indiana University, the ISO under music director Jun Märkl was especially primed to respond to the historic, perpetually challenging demands of Igor Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring." The 1913 ballet has been  known since almost exclusively as an orchestral showpiece, without any choreography except that conjured up in listeners' heads.  The scenario of the ballet lent the young composer a form, culminating in a virgin's fatal sacrifice to propitiate the gods. The prehistoric Russia evoked suggested that the Ballets Russes creators' enduring innovation would be primarily musical and convulsively...
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Family values at the edge of night: Southbank Theatre Company produces 'Fun Home'

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Over my mostly adolescent years as an Episcopalian, I never had the opportunity of hearing the graveside liturgy that reminds us, according to the Book of Common Prayer: "In the midst of life we are in death."  Somehow I picked up that precise reminder long ago and usefully thought of those ancient words of devotion, both obvious and paradoxical as they are, while attending a performance of "Fun Home" Thursday night. The season-opening production by the Southbank Theatre Company carries the magic of charm and searing revelations as it casts an authentic aura of bitter and illuminating truth at Butler University's Shelton Auditorium . Bruce uncovers Small Alison's forbidden casket fun.   The show's title turns out to be family slang, also with a whiff of paradox, for "funeral home," the Bechdel family business in a small Pennsylvania town. In the graphic memoir by Alison Bechdel, which forms the basis of this lilting yet  profound musical by Je...
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Centenary observance of an innovator: Rob Dixon leads Coltrane tribute

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Rob Dixon holds forth in Coltrane celebration. There can be little question that the most appropriate musician to lead an Indy Jazz Fest tribute performance on the 100th anniversary of John Coltrane's birth was Rob Dixon . Jazz fans have had a few decades to appreciate the protean capabilities of the Atlanta-bred tenor   saxophonist. Dixon has been an indefatigable presence on the local music scene, earning him the description "the jazz mayor of Indianapolis." His occasional programming of Coltrane's "A Love Supreme" has cemented his connection to the master. In corporate terms, the quartet that offered two Coltrane sets Wednesday at the Jazz Kitchen   did business as the I ndianapolis Jazz Collective. The band took in as special guest Lasana D. Kazembe , a spoken-word artist who proved apt for evoking the Coltrane idealism and displaying an original, intense  manner of representing Coltrane's musical breadth through verbal spectacle. Kembe's contri...
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Repertoire shift in preliminary phase signals new direction for International Violin Competition of Indianapolis

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Leah Amory was distinctive in appearance and repertoir e As the 12th Quadrennial International Violin Competition of Indianapolis advances, its launch with performances this week by all the participants may fade as the public and violinists who fall by the wayside direct attention to the survivors in the semifinals and finals. Still, music lovers who don't necessarily favor Bach over Mozart or vice versa may be stunned by the disappearance  of unaccompanied violin sonatas and partitas  by the baroque master whose output is considered foundational. In their place in the prelims is one of five sonatas for violin and piano by the late 18th-century Austrian master Mozart (or Franz Schubert's Sonatina in  D major). This decision will lend more prominence to the  focus on Mozart in the Classical Finals (Sept. 30 and Oct. 1),  where his five concertos, marvels for a 19-year-old, are in the competition repertoire. What gives? some may ask. "It's fairer to these kids to ...
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''Everybody's Favorite Mothers' gets behind banners of protest to foreground widely available celebration

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Mother of them all: Jeanne Manford joins the parade. The shadow version of "coming out" turns out to have a brilliance all its own. "Everybody's  Favorite Mothers" proclaims the process in an enthralling way that  doesn't skirt the difficulties of owning sexual identity through open self-assertion and garnering the support of loved ones. In a premiere performance seen Thursday night at the Phoenix Theatre,   the audience of James Still's new play is brought into a close-up observer/participant's role centered on the emergence of gay-rights momentum and support in the 1970s. Without throwing himself into the briar patch of documentary-genre devotion, the playwright immerses us in a family story complicated by the movement's internal divisions and the unpredictable benefits of a loving ally's imaginative breakthroughs. The watchword evoked a few times in the play — "Vision without action is hallucination" — could be revised, somewhat ...
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Coast of Cornwall hosts zany doings as Buck Creek presents 'The Pirates of Penzance'

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Choosing from the summit of W.S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan's operetta achievement to start Buck Creek Players ' 53rd season also confirmed the company president's personal history with "The Pirates of Penzance." Georgeanna Teipen's curtain speech Friday night set the tone for what she said was her aim in placing the work first in 2026-27 at the troupe's home on the far-southeastern side of Indianapolis. Mabel and Frederic sing of their bond, achieved with difficulty. The ensemble riches set forth in Gilbert's book and lyrics, complemented in permanent fashion by Sullivan's music, work hand-in-glove with  the broadly outlined individual vividness presented in such characters as the lovers Frederic and Mabel, the Pirate King, Major-General Stanley, the nurse Ruth, and such memorable minor characters as the Police Sergeant, who in due course reminds us that "a policeman's lot is not a happy one." The forces of law and order, and of ou...
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